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With The Cure\u2019s 14th album Songs Of A Lost World now finally upon us, MOJO goes back to the very beginning. Out of new town ennui would grow the post-punk era\u2019s most everlasting of groups, but not before hospital gigs, biscuit bribery and Tie A Yellow Ribbon made Robert Smith\u2019s original bandmates despair. It took punk epiphanies, a key kiwi, and their leader\u2019s resolve to effect the great escape. \u201cRob doesn\u2019t care what you think about him,\u201d discovers Keith Cameron. \u201cHe always had his own vision of what he was going to be.\u201d<\/p>\n
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On December 20, 1976 a band called Malice made its debut public performance at St. Wilfrid\u2019s Catholic School in Crawley \u2013 where guitarist-singer Robert Smith, drummer Laurence \u2018Lol\u2019 Tolhurst and bassist Michael Dempsey had until recently been pupils. They opened their set with Thin Lizzy\u2019s Jailbreak, sung by Martin Creasy, a local journalist wearing a brown three-piece suit. <\/p>\n
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\u201cWe had never rehearsed with him,\u201d Dempsey recalls. \u201cI think we would have left along with most of the audience if that were possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tolhurst, meanwhile, wore a black studded catsuit and mascara in the style of his hero Alice Cooper. The set ended with a version of Wild Thing, sung by the drummer. \u201cIt was a disaster,\u201d Tolhurst said, 40 years later, in his memoir Cured. \u201cI thought, \u2018That\u2019s that, then.\u2019 But it wasn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
On December 31, 1977, the same group, but with a different name and minus the singing journalist, assembled at Orpington General Hospital. The hospital staff assumed that having a band called Easy Cure playing their New Year\u2019s Eve dinner dance must be a joke. The members of Easy Cure, however, weren\u2019t laughing. From a school to a hospital in 12 months didn\u2019t feel like huge progress. Still, the reward for playing two one-hour party-hearty sets would be riches beyond their dreams: \u00a320 each and unlimited free beer. \u201cFor 20 quid, we\u2019ll play anywhere,\u201d they agreed.<\/p>\n
An inkling of trouble ahead came during soundcheck, when Tolhurst was told to stop tuning his drums: the noise was \u201cdisturbing the patients\u201d. Smith, meanwhile, drew up a setlist that mostly comprised the band\u2019s own songs: punk-blasted sneers like Heroin Face and I Want To Be Old, or a creepy vignette inspired by Albert Camus\u2019 L\u2019\u00c9tranger, called Killing An Arab.<\/p>\n
As the first set ended amid restive booing, Easy Cure took a break and discussed how to proceed without being lynched by Orpington Hospital\u2019s by now well-lubricated nurses, porters and clerical workers. Their manager, Dempsey\u2019s brother-in-law, suggested the trump card held by every sensible light entertainment ensemble in 1977: Tony Orlando & Dawn\u2019s Tie A Yellow Ribbon. To general amazement, lead guitarist Porl Thompson admitted he knew the song from playing in a cabaret band. Unfortunately, he couldn\u2019t remember how to play the whole thing. Thus, Easy Cure opened their second set with the first verse and chorus of Tie A Yellow Ribbon, repeated ad nauseam. A bottle was thrown. Robert Smith and his girlfriend Mary Poole were pursued by some angry patrons into the car park, where a fight ensued. The scene, typical of the apathy-cum-hostility the band encountered in their Home Counties hinterland, marked a turning point.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe realised then that we couldn\u2019t just go and play any old place,\u201d Smith later reflected. \u201cWe didn\u2019t want to learn other people\u2019s songs. That way we would have become yet another pub band.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thirteen months after the hospital debacle, the same band, now reconfigured as a trio of Robert Smith, Michael Dempsey and Lol Tolhurst, and definitively renamed The Cure, had a record deal from the man who had signed The Jam, their debut record Killing An Arab was NME\u2019s Single Of The Week, and they were on the front cover of Sounds, proclaimed \u201cStars In Embryo.\u201d Even given the accelerated momentum of the post-punk era, this was a remarkable turnaround. What catalytic energy had driven The Cure so far, so soon?<\/p>\n
\u201cThe band was a ticket out of Crawley,\u201d Tolhurst told MOJO in 2021, \u201cout of going down the pub and having fights with skinheads. Deep in our psyche we knew: If we don\u2019t do something, we\u2019re destined to live in this place until we die.\u201d<\/p>\n
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First settled in the 5th century by Saxons who named it Crow\u2019s Leah \u2013 a clearing infested by crows \u2013 modern Crawley hides its rural origins beneath blandly utilitarian architecture and a collection of distinct residential neighbourhoods connected by a great many roundabouts.<\/p>\n
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\u201cTo be different in such a place required some resolve, says Michael Dempsey, \u201cbut you immediately stood out. There was a steady beat of aggression \u2013 largely born out of suspicion of anything that failed to conform.\u201d<\/p>\n
The town\u2019s economy was (and still is) principally driven by the adjacent Gatwick Airport, around which sprung a proliferation of light industry units, including Upjohn Ltd, a pharmaceutical manufacturer that from the mid-\u201960s was managed by Alex Smith, father of Robert. With three railway stations, the M23 on its eastern edge and the airport to the north, Crawley has an abundance of transport links \u2013 yet that didn\u2019t make it any easier for Robert Smith and friends to get out.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were only two ways to escape,\u201d Tolhurst considers. \u201cYou either had to be a great footballer, or in a band.\u201d<\/p>\n
As it happened, the teenage Robert Smith was a pretty good footballer. In March 1975, the Crawley Observer commended his \u201cdevastating wing play\u201d for Three Bridges Wasps in a 3-2 defeat to Shoreham in the Minor Sussex Cup. But music seemed a more feasible option. At 16, the school careers officer quizzed him and his friends about their future ambitions. \u201cI said I wanted to be in a pop group and they all giggled,\u201d Smith subsequently recalled. \u201cAnother boy said he wanted to be an astronaut and they giggled at that too. He ended up working in a bookies, but I was really self-centred and went ahead. At least I\u2019ve tried.\u201d<\/p>\n
With his 30-year-old brother Richard a knowledgable source of head food for mid-\u201970s teenage English misfits \u2013 King Crimson, Nick Drake, MC5, Trout Mask Replica, Mahavishnu Orchestra\u2019s Birds Of Fire \u2013 Smith hunkered down with a \u00a320 Woolworths Top 20 guitar, a 30-watt amplifier, and some existentialist literature. Tolhurst and Dempsey already shared his love of Hendrix and T.Rex, and Porl Thompson proclaimed himself a fellow Sensational Alex Harvey Band fan. During the hot summer of 1976, a group of sorts began rehearsing at the Smith family home on Cobbett Close.<\/p>\n
On January 20, 1977, Tolhurst suggested a trip to Croydon to see The Stranglers at the Red Deer. Dempsey drove, Lol bought the tickets, Robert and Mary sat in the back seat. Punk, hitherto an exotic concept they\u2019d only read about in the music press, was now made flesh. A month later, The Stranglers played Crawley College. Amid the drunken mayhem, Tolhurst found himself on-stage dancing with Jean-Jacques Burnel and went home missing a shoe. In Robert Smith\u2019s mind, blanks were filling in: \u201cWhen I first saw The Stranglers, I thought, This is it. I saw the Buzzcocks the following week, and I thought, This is definitely it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fuelled by the latest punk singles bought from Rick Gallup\u2019s record counter at Horley Radio Rentals, Easy Cure began their escape. In April they answered a Melody Maker advert from the German record label Hansa \u2013 home to Boney M \u2013 and were invited to audition at Morgan Studios in Willesden, north-west London. To their amazement, they were offered a contract \u2013 and Easy Cure signed. \u201cIt was the catastrophe before the shining moment of realisation,\u201d says Tolhurst.<\/p>\n
Over the subsequent months, while the band established semi-regular gigs at Crawley pub The Rocket, Hansa made clearer their interest in photogenic teen-bait playing cover versions (Japan were signed from the same auditions). But Easy Cure gave the notion short shrift.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Clash had no trouble with I Fought The Law, but we refused to do it,\u201d says Dempsey. \u201cHansa sent a producer down to Crawley, who had played bass for [Noosha] Fox, Gary Taylor, but he clearly had as little enthusiasm for us as we for him.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Thus far, Easy Cure had persisted with the notion of having a lead singer. Yet when the latest of these, Peter O\u2019Toole, left after a gig at The Rocket in September to join a kibbutz, Smith finally assumed the role himself. \u201cIt was clear nobody was going to express his thoughts and feelings better than him,\u201d says Dempsey. With Smith at the forefront, three recording sessions for Hansa ensued, with Rebel Rebel and I Saw Her Standing There trotted out unenthusiastically amid the band\u2019s own material, including Killing An Arab. In spring 1978, at Hansa\u2019s Mayfair office, the label\u2019s UK A&R manager Steve Rowland terminated the contract due to Easy Cure\u2019s recalcitrance. Rather than apologise and plead for a second chance, Robert Smith didn\u2019t blink. <\/p>\n
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\u201cHe said, \u2018Well, can we have the rights to our songs back?\u2019\u201d Tolhurst remembers. \u201cAnd they went, \u2018Err\u2026 OK. Not even people in prison are gonna like this stuff.\u2019 Those was their exact words.\u201d He laughs. \u201cRob doesn\u2019t care. He doesn\u2019t care what you think about him. He always had his own vision of what he was going to be.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shortly afterwards, Porl Thompson played his last gig with Easy Cure (though he would return for stints in 1983-94 and 2005-08). The guitarist\u2019s flamboyant proficiency had become incompatible with Smith\u2019s vision. The band name also submitted to the new minimalism. They were now simply The Cure.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe early Cure sound was pure nihilism,\u201d says Dempsey. \u201cWe belligerently stripped away everything we loathed in music and found we were not left with much \u2013 minimal bass and drums, economical guitar and oblique lyrics.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the end of May, The Cure recorded a demo at Chestnut Studios in Haslemere, paid for by Rick Gallup. \u201cI don\u2019t know if any of us would have actually risked 50 pounds on the band,\u201d says Tolhurst, \u201cbut he did.\u201d The tape featured four songs \u2013 10.15 Saturday Night, Boys Don\u2019t Cry, It\u2019s Not You and Fire In Cairo \u2013 and Smith sent one to every major UK record company, including a note (\u201cHello. I\u2019m Robert from The Cure. We don\u2019t have any contracts but we would like some\u201d), a tea bag and a Digestive biscuit. As Dempsey recalls, \u201cWe were rejected by everyone \u2013 Phonogram, Virgin, EMI, Island \u2013 many using the same phrasing: \u2018Not the type of material we are looking for.\u2019 Except Chris Parry, who wrote back saying, \u2018I would like to meet the group.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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A 29-year-old New Zealander, Parry had enjoyed chart success in his homeland as drummer with late-\u201960s psych-pop band The Fourmyula, before moving to the UK and joining Polydor\u2019s A&R department in 1974. He signed The Jam in 1977, but only after his attempts to bring The Clash and the Sex Pistols to the label were thwarted by superiors. His disgruntlement boiled over in mid-1978 when his enthusiasm for The Cure\u2019s demo fell on cloth ears.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey just went, \u2018Huh, s\u2019all right.\u2019 I thought, Ah fuck you, it\u2019s better than that. So I put my notice in. On that tape there were two extraordinary songs: 10.15 Saturday Night and Boys Don\u2019t Cry. From an A&R point of view, the important thing is: Does this have what in the old days would be called \u2018the sound\u2019? Is there something distinctive? It\u2019s often the voice. Robert did have a distinctive voice. Then meeting him, I felt there was something about him, he was a very bright boy.\u201d He pauses. \u201cThey looked shocking though.\u201d<\/p>\n
Parry was especially appalled by Michael Dempsey\u2019s \u201ccorduroys, Hush Puppies and grandpa jumper.\u201d For their part, although initially disappointed to discover he was offering to sign them to a label that did not yet exist (fittingly, it was soon named Fiction), The Cure soon warmed to Parry (Dempsey: \u201cWe were entertained by his casual manner\u201d). Both shared an outsider\u2019s perspective, had already been bruised by the establishment, and were driven by an entrenched belief they knew best. Ironically, and perhaps inevitably, these common instincts would soon conflict, but in September 1978, The Cure happily acquiesced with Parry\u2019s still nebulous future. It wasn\u2019t like anyone else had dunked their Digestive.<\/p>\n
\u201cWithout Chris Parry there would have been no Cure,\u201d says Tolhurst. \u201cWe would have probably circled around the plughole a few more times, and disappeared. He was the only person from London who bothered to come and see us play in our hometown.\u201d
Parry\u2019s plan was essentially to get Polydor to sign his new label: to demonstrate his viability he needed a Cure record out, pronto. An initial session at Morgan Studios yielded a stinging version of Killing An Arab, which all agreed should be the first single. Parry himself produced, with the studio\u2019s in-house rookie Mike Hedges engineering, an arrangement repeated over two subsequent bookings in November and January, yielding some 25 songs, from which the debut Cure album Three Imaginary Boys emerged. Parry sought to distance The Cure from punk, without necessarily abandoning their astringent perspective on the human condition.
\u201cWe wanted space,\u201d he says. \u201cHow can we make this sound more lonely? Can we make this emptier? The approach was to take the songs and these three characters and make a really good record, but one that left you thinking, \u2018These guys are a bit weird \u2013 there\u2019s something not quite right here.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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In between sessions, Parry sent the band out of their suburban domain, with support slots for Wire and The Jam in Canterbury, UK Subs at the West Hampstead Moonlight Club, and a short tour opening for Generation X, including Birmingham where they covered Paranoid. Seeing Wire on October 5, however, had a profound impact on Smith\u2019s vision for The Cure. <\/p>\n
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\u201cWire gave me the idea to follow a different course, to hold out against the punk wave,\u201d Smith told Guitar World in 1996. \u201cDuring the first song, about half the audience left. It was the most intense thing I thought I\u2019d ever see \u2013 blinding white lights shooting straight into the audience and this incredible wall of noise. Then they\u2019d stop it and do little quiet bits. I remember a big row with the others in the van afterwards because they all thought it was shit, and I thought it was immense. That\u2019s what I wanted The Cure to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still finessing the details of Fiction\u2019s accommodation with Polydor, Chris Parry struck a one-off deal with Walthamstow independent label Small Wonder to release a double A-side single featuring setlist standouts Killing An Arab and 10.15 Saturday Night. Parry regretted what he now regards as \u201cthrowing away\u201d the latter, but if he wanted to make an impression, Killing An Arab did the job. It\u2019s a measure of the era\u2019s ambivalent \u2013 or insensitive \u2013 attitude to race and gender politics that the press barely addressed the song\u2019s power to confuse. In the Sounds cover feature, Smith stated that Hansa had refused to entertain releasing it \u201c\u2019cos we had to keep in with the Arabs\u2026 it was so ridiculous.\u201d On tour in February 1979, other perspectives were made apparent. The National Front showed up in force at the West Kensington Nashville Rooms. The next night, at Kingston Polytechnic, the students union banned them from playing Killing An Arab, until Smith explained the lyric\u2019s A-level origins.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t recall for a moment discussing how anybody might misconstrue this lyric,\u2019 says Dempsey, Smith\u2019s English Lit classmate, \u201cbut then we had overlooked the obvious: not everybody had read the book.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Cure felt even more misconstrued when their album was released. On the subsequent UK tour, Smith played Chris Parry some demos. This, he said, was how the album should have sounded.<\/p>\n
\u201cCrunchy cheap guitars, \u00e0 la Buzzcocks,\u201d says Parry. \u201cJoin the queue. Mike Hedges and I were not looking back at punk, we were looking forward.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cRobert says he doesn\u2019t like the first album,\u201d says Tolhurst. \u201cWell, the reason is, because he wasn\u2019t in control of it.\u201d Parry\u2019s studio methods caused friction, but far more contentious was his deciding on a tracklist (bizarrely including a version of Foxy Lady, sung by Dempsey) and artwork that infamously represented the trio as household appliances, without consulting The Cure.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs far as I\u2019m concerned,\u201d says Parry, \u201cthis was a young band. I wanted to do the best by them. But I needed to create something, and I knew how to create it and they didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although Three Imaginary Boys presented a unique artistic vision, the route out of suburbia and into the world was proving fraught. Major bumps still lay ahead \u2013 and there would be casualties. \u201cPerhaps all the problems with the making of Three Imaginary Boys demonstrated in one quick, early lesson, how not to do it,\u201d says Dempsey. \u201cAnd gave Robert, who was a very quick learner, the knowledge of what to avoid in the coming years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Michael Dempsey played with The Cure for the last time at Hammersmith Odeon on October 15, 1979, the final date of an extraordinary tour supporting Siouxsie & The Banshees on which Robert Smith played with both bands, following the exit of the head-liners\u2019 guitarist John McKay. Days later, after a tense Cure meeting, Smith phoned Chris Parry and told him he would only continue \u201cwith a band I can get my head around\u201d \u2013 ie. without Dempsey. Smith invited Parry to his parents\u2019 house in Crawley and presented him with his vision: a new glacial dark sound and new bassist, Simon Gallup, younger brother of Easy Cure\u2019s early patron Rick. Here was The Cure\u2019s future, first glimpsed by Smith a year earlier when Wire had blown his mind.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think Michael challenged Robert in a way that Robert didn\u2019t like to be challenged,\u201d says Parry. \u201cThere was obviously a sense of Robert wanting to get control. I saw it as, \u2018OK, this might be what\u2019s needed.\u2019 And it was.\u201d<\/p>\n
In January 1980, Robert Smith took his new model band back to Morgan Studios and began recording Seventeen Seconds, co-producing it himself with Mike Hedges. It was, reflects Lol Tolhurst today, the moment when the band became \u201ctruly us. The first album is The Cure as well, but it\u2019s also like, \u2018Hey, this is the band that played Orpington Hospital, and it\u2019s not that different. Except we\u2019re not playing Tie A Yellow Ribbon\u2026\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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On March 29, 2019, before a star-studded audience in New York, The Cure were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Accepting the honour from Nine Inch Nails\u2019 Trent Reznor, Robert Smith was flanked to his left by the current members of The Cure, and to his right by five former members, including Dempsey and Tolhurst: the original three imaginary boys reunited. <\/p>\n
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Significantly, Smith\u2019s speech acknowledged just one other person. \u201cWhen we very first started, and we were a teenage trio in 1978 playing in the south of England, at one of our very first shows this small bloke came along, and we weren\u2019t very sure who he was. And he saw something in us that most people didn\u2019t. And that\u2019s Chris Parry \u2013 proving that he did get something right after all.\u201d<\/p>\n
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This article originally appeared in Issue 328 of MOJO<\/em><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider color=”#111111″ module_class=”custom-divider” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” custom_margin=”||0px||false|false” custom_padding=”||0px||false|false” global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content”][\/et_pb_divider][et_pb_text module_class=”credit-names” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font_size=”14px” text_orientation=”center” global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content”]<\/p>\n Images: <\/strong>Getty<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It took punk epiphanies, a key kiwi, and their leader\u2019s resolve to effect the great escape<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":1907,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mojo-presents"],"acf":[],"modified_by":"kschwarz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1906"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1913,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1906\/revisions\/1913"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}